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Pineapple Preserves
Pare the pineapples, and pick out the "eyes."
Cut in slices and stamp out the hard center from each. The large end of a pastry tube does this nicely. Cook the slices in boiling water until tender and drain off the water.
For each pound of fruit, weighed after it is ready for cooking, take three fourths a pound of sugar and half a cup of water. Make a syrup of the sugar and water, together with the juice and yellow rind of a lemon, for each two pounds of fruit. When the syrup boils, skim and put in the slices of pineapple. Let cook slowly half an hour and then store in cans. The pineapple may be canned with half the quantity of sugar given above. Prepare the fruit in the same manner. Use the pineapple water in making the syrup.
A straightforward sugar-syrup preserve that depends almost entirely on getting the fruit fully tender before the sugar goes anywhere near it. The one modern change is at the end, where "store in cans" is no longer sufficient instruction.
- Cook the fruit tender firstThis is the hinge. Sugar syrup firms pineapple fibre, so any slice that is still tough when it enters the syrup will stay tough through the whole half hour. Simmer the slices in plain water until a knife slides through with no resistance.
- Coring without a pastry tubeThe large end of a plain round pastry tip works exactly as described, but an apple corer or a 1-inch round cutter does the same job on a 1/2-inch slice. The core is edible, only woody.
- Weigh after trimmingThe proportions are by weight of prepared fruit, not whole pineapple. A 3-lb pineapple yields roughly 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 lb of pared, cored slices, so plan on losing close to half.
- Sugar ratioThree-quarters pound of sugar per pound of fruit is about 1 2/3 cups granulated sugar per pound. The half-quantity version noted at the end gives a lighter, fresher preserve that will not keep as long once opened.
- The lemonOne lemon's juice and yellow zest per two pounds of fruit. Take the zest in strips with a peeler and leave the white pith behind; the pith turns bitter over a long simmer. Pineapple is already acidic, so the lemon is for flavour and clarity rather than safety.
- Use the pineapple waterThe blanching liquid carries real flavour and is worth using for the syrup in either version, not only the half-sugar one. Strain it first.
- Sealing and storageThe open-kettle method assumed here, hot preserve straight into jars and left to seal itself, is no longer considered reliable; jars sealed this way can mould in the cupboard. Fill clean hot half-pint or pint jars and process them in a boiling-water bath according to a current tested guide for pineapple, then check the seals before storing.
- YieldTwo pounds of prepared fruit with the full sugar fills roughly four to five half-pint jars, depending on how much syrup is packed in with the slices.
Preserving whole pineapples became practical for northern American households as steamship and rail freight from the Caribbean and, later, large-scale Hawaiian canning made the fruit a more ordinary grocery around the turn of the twentieth century. The blanching step is also quietly useful chemistry: raw pineapple contains bromelain, the enzyme that keeps fresh pineapple from setting in gelatin and that makes the raw fruit sting the mouth, and heating the slices in water destroys it before the fruit is ever put up.